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The Kodi Development Team Wants To Be Legitimate and Bring DRM To the Platform. (torrentfreak.com)
New submitter pecosdave writes: The XBMC/ Kodi development team has taken a lot of heat over the years, mostly due to third-party developers introducing piracy plugins to the platform. In many cases, cheap Android computers are often sold with these plugins pre-installed with the Kodi or XBMC name attached to them -- something that caused Amazon to ban sales of such devices. The Kodi team is not happy about this, and has taken the fight to the sellers. The Kodi team is now trying to work with rights holders to introduce DRM and legitimate plugins to the platform. Is this the first step towards creating a true one-stop do it yourself Linux entertainment system?
When these guys start doing something people hate, someone will fork and make it good again. Just look at Apache->MariaDB or OpenOffice->LibreOffice.
There's a reason many people used this platform (right or wrong) and they're removing that reason. Now, they'll just be yet another media player that's locked in with DRM in a giant pool of pre-existing systems.
perhaps it could be considered that actually using a product for its intended purpose would be why people choose it, adding new features to a product does not necessarily diminish the value of the existing features
or maybe you're just a stupid troll
You clearly don't understand the product or why it's so popular. The problem isn't if they add DRM for plugins and modules for properly licensing content.. It's that it USUALLY will mean they will have to enact it across the board or lock our certain other plugins as part of the licensing model. That's where they're going to lose out and the point of my comment.
Stop supporting people that refuse to let you do what you could legally do back in the days of VCR's.
No sir I dont like it.
This seems to happen whenever an OSS project goes mainstream and someone decides they want to be "respected" by the evil jerks who created the situation that led to the OSS project being created in the first place. If they create addons with DRM they will have to be binary only and separate from KODI itself since KODI is GPL2. That said KODI even points you to forks should you dislike their new direction
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Plex has overtaken them hard and they are desperately trying to catch up with the popularity of the rogue fork from years ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Over the last few years Kodi removed karaoke, choose a worse default skin and menu layout with worse customizability and worse loading icon, and created issues with virtually every add on with their updates and now they want to drm it? Gotta say Kodi is going way way downhill. I want a simple media player. This isn't a game breaking change on its own but it could be the last straw of many poor decisions that kills it. What are the other options now?
Or maybe the whole project was born from mplayer and a pirated Xbox SDK. Oh, and they justified not releasing the GPLed source code since they only released it through piracy sites.
Now, tell me what its original purpose was again?
All the content I need is on a computer connected to my TV over HDMI. I don't need kodi for myself, but when my mom is babysitting my 2-year-old, I would like something with an easy menu interface that I can program content from multiple sources on. So whether my daughter wants to watch a show on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or a mp4 video file on the hard drive, my mom shouldn't have to know or care what the source of the content is.
Hopefully, Kodi can get to that point someday, but without official support from those streaming providers, it will never get there. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.
Because Kodi has an infinitely better interface from the couch than any of the websites.
Even if a particular website's interface somehow caters to the 'from the couch' usage, an application like Kodi provides an infinitely better interface for changing between providers, when the content is provider based, as well as enforcing some semblence of consistency across the board (if you use amazon prime, netflix, youtube, and crunchyroll, each has their own precious snowflake interface for navigation and playback control).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
worked great, Napster became the most dominant platform for legitimate music downloads.
LOL, "what an idiot you are" is not an argument
"Supporting DRM means that the software is no longer open source nor is it for the users but for the corporations."
Firefox now supports DRM, did I miss the announent that it is no longer open source?
Read the article, they don't want to *prevent* these plugins, they just want more legitimate streaming options to be available.
Like many of their users (including me).